Pro-Life Texas has released the first in a planned series of videos centering on the “what ifs” of all the lives lost through abortion. The producer and writer, curiously enough, were rejected by the crowd-sourcing company Kickstarterjust like the filmmakers of the upcoming Kermit Gosnell movie:

On February 27, Pastor Bill Shanks of New Covenant Fellowship Church in Kenner was one of two pastors who visited the home of Absolute Concrete owners Melvin andLinda Backes. Click to enlarge photo of the pastor in front of their home…

The couple told the pastors they owned the company but son Ronald runs it.

I spoke with Pastor Shanks by phone, and he said Melvin told him, “This is just business. If you give me $20,000, I’ll tear up the contract.”

Melvin is a retired firefighter.

“My son is a firefighter, too, and knows Melvin as a brave man,” Pastor Shanks told me. “I told him to be brave for the babies. And I warned him that I’ve been involved in this fight for years and have seen one after another business crumble after becoming involved in abortion.”

Pastor Shanks said Linda’s heart was “as hard as concrete.” She told him she supported abortion and Planned Parenthood, adding, “If we let these babies live, they’ll just grow up and kill us.”

Absolute Concrete has not returned my calls requesting comment.

This past Saturday, about 50 pro-lifers protested and prayed at the site, getting workers to leave….

The workers were back today, but pro-lifers will not rest.

Take the poll! Should pro-lifers collect the $20,000 to get Absolute Concrete to walk off the job?

The Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department sent Thomas More Societya letter today stating Fayetteville 40 Days for Life could resume holding signs at its prayer vigil outside the Fayetteville Planned Parenthood abortion facility.

“It appears that the communication from the AHTD district office was misinterpreted and/or misunderstood,” wrote Rita Looney, Chief Legal Counsel for AHTD.

With that, the Department’s violation of the pro-lifers’ right of free speech ended one week after it began.

Those who abandon God’s teachings praise wicked people, but those who follow God’s teachings oppose wicked people. Evil people do not understand justice, but those who seek the Lord understand everything.

The failure of this very modest amendment says a lot about the state of abortion politics in Britain.

The Left-wing establishment could not let it pass because it cannot tolerate the concept of any limit on access to abortion whatsoever. It proclaims that it wants abortion to be safe, legal and rare. But it regards abortion as a fundamental human right if not a positive assertion of a woman’s freedom to control her own destiny – and any attempt to constrict a human freedom is, obviously, a betrayal of that freedom in principle.

In trumpeting the right of abortion over any wider concerns about, say, its effects upon society, gender relations or (Heaven forbid) the welfare of the unborn child itself, the establishment Left has made its position as plain and bold as possible.

The “reversals” also show that the ingestion of medication abortion drugs is never a sure thing when it comes to terminating a pregnancy. While anti-abortion activists tout the alleged “high complication rates” of the process, what they conveniently leave out is that the most common complication is that the patient remains pregnant, and that the protocol needs to be followed up with D&C or vacuum aspiration abortion in order to end the pregnancy….

Why is the “reversal” apparently so successful then? Primarily it is because those who are trying to continue the pregnancy are already in the midst of a failed medication abortion to start with….

“There’s no evidence of any demonstrable effect of the ‘treatment’ these anti-abortion centers are marketing,” Dr. Cheryl Chastine, a provider at South Wind Women’s Center in Wichita, Kansas, said. “The medical literature is quite clear that mifepristone on its own is only about 50 percent effective at ending a pregnancy. That means that even if these doctors were to offer a large dose of purple Skittles, they’d appear to have ‘worked’ to ‘save’ the pregnancy about half the time. Those numbers are consistent with what these people are reporting.”

“[The abortion pill] binds much more tightly to the progesterone receptor, to block it than progesterone itself does…. So there really is not much evidence to indicate, I’m really not aware of anything, that by increasing the amount of progesterone you’re gonna somehow block the effect of this drug….

I think this is really outside of standard of care to just begin doing this kind of treatment, without collecting more rigorous studies about its effectiveness.”

Note: The function of mifepristone is to block progesterone receptors (which is why, in an abortion pill reversal, an extra injection of progesterone is given to counteract these effects). Mifepristone “directly causes endometrial decidual degeneration, cervical softening and dilatation, release of endogenous prostaglandins, and an increase in the sensitivity of the myometrium to the contractile effects of prostaglandins. Mifepristone-induced decidual breakdown indirectly leads to trophoblast detachment, resulting in decreased syncytiotrophoblast production of hCG, which in turn causes decreased production of progesterone by the corpus luteum (pregnancy is dependent on progesterone production by the corpus luteum through the first 9 weeks of gestation—until placental progesterone production has increased enough to take the place of corpus luteum progesterone production).”